


Stay

by Unforgotten



Category: The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Extra Treat, F/M, Fix-It, POV First Person, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 13:40:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17142770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: Henry lives.Some years later, he learns why, and how.





	Stay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lizwontcry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizwontcry/gifts).



_Saturday, October 27, 1984/Monday, January 1, 2007 (Henry is 43, Clare is 35)_

The end is here. The end is here, and I am kissing Clare, and then I am somewhere else. The sky above me is blank. As blank as the future, my future; as blank as the details of what's going to happen now. I know very little about what's coming; the day of my own death is a day to which I have never been, and so all I know is what I found when I looked it up, during one of my visits to the future. I know I will die from a gunshot wound; I know it will be today. There is no more time left.

I am going to die now. If I could, I would try to outrun it, even if running would end up taking me straight into the bullet's path. But I cannot run, and so instead I take in my surroundings: The black-gray sky above, the dead tall grass all around. A foot away from me stands a doe, wide-eyed and frozen. It's not the first time I've shocked a deer to stillness; there were others, when I was boy, and used to find myself in the park in the middle of the night.

She'll turn, in a moment, be gone in a swift fluid grace. I glance away from her and see a flash of orange. There's no way to tell how close it is, yet the shape of what is about to happen begins to make a picture for me, an answer I didn't realize I desperately needed until now. I never thought I did, or would, that knowing would make such a difference, but it's with gratitude that I understand. In a moment, the deer will raise her tail, white flag of surrender; in a moment, she will run, and some stranger in an orange vest will fire, and instead of hitting her, they'll hit--

Raised voices, from the same direction as the flash of orange. Men's voices, deep and vaguely familiar; and a girl's voice, young, more familiar than any other, and it doesn't surprise me, perhaps it can't surprise me that I would be so near to Clare at the end.

Beside me, the doe whirls as she flees away from the voices, away from me. I brace myself, and Clare's voice rises. She's almost in tears now, but even as I call her name, I'm slipping, being pulled back--

And then Clare is there, my Clare, the Clare I was kissing just a minute ago, or two, the one I was kissing a lifetime ago, and she's reaching for me, and she's saying, "Henry, where is it, Henry, where are you hit?" and she's weeping, and her hands are shaking, but no matter how hard she looks, there's no blood, no bullet, there's nothing here on our porch but Clare and I, and then all our friends' voices, wanting to know what's happening. Then she's kissing me again, or I'm kissing her, and we're clinging to each other, and someone wraps a blanket around my shoulders. Eventually things get quieter, and everyone else leaves, and it's just the two of us--no, the three of us, because Alba's here too, the way she would have been at the end, if it had been the end, except that it's not, all I can think is it's not the end, and it won't be for months that it occurs to me that this just might have been the beginning.

 

* * *

 

_Monday, July 16, 2007 (Henry is 44, and 70; Clare is 36)_

When I wake up, it's nearly noon. I'd have slept later if it hadn't been for the laughter coming from the kitchen. As it is, I will myself to a sitting position, and then into the wheelchair that always sits by my side of the bed now, just in case I need it.

I've been getting up later and later ever since the first of the year, in a melancholy that's gripped me more and more as the weeks and months pass. No longer having an end date has left me unmoored: I don't know how long I'll be stuck like this, in a life I was supposed to leave, in a body that can no longer carry me at speed.

I haven't told Clare any of this; but since I also haven't let her make appointments with contractors to set up the renovations she wants to make to the house, I suspect she knows, or has guessed, at least.

There's laughter coming from the kitchen. I haven't heard Clare laugh like that in months, almost a year. Since before the amputations; since before she knew how little time I had left. We've both been engulfed by the same shadow, not knowing if it's lifted yet, or if it ever will; I haven't been to the future since the doe, so there is no way to gauge what lies ahead.

Even Alba isn't immune to the melancholy in our house; it's not until her childish laughter joins the others that I realize I can't remember the last time I heard our daughter laugh unreservedly.

When I arrive at the kitchen, I watch them for a moment: Clare, standing by the stove, oven mitt in one hand, a whisk in the other; Alba, sitting in a stranger's lap, telling him excitedly about how she's going to start first grade next month, and finally meet the friends older Alba has told her she'll have; the stranger himself, in one of the extra wheelchairs sitting around the house--in case I go somewhere on my hands and knees, and am too tired to "walk" back the way I came. The stranger's hair is all gray, and when he turns in his chair to look at me, there are lines on his face I've never imagined seeing in the mirror.

I don't have a chance to ask him anything, not this time. Before I can open my mouth to speak, I'm somewhere else, for just a few minutes: naked in a foot of warm water, the waves tugging me this way and that, the moon echoing on the water, showing me the way to shore. I've just made it to the sand when I'm wrenched sideways, and then I'm on the floor in the kitchen, bare and naked, and the other Henry is gone, and Alba has her hands over her eyes as Clare kneels beside me and asks if I'm all right

I didn't carry any of the sand home with me, but my hair's still wet; and the aftertaste in my mouth is something much sweeter than salt. I tell Clare I think I must have been at Lake Eerie; she tells me the Henry who was here before was from the heretofore unimaginable year of 2033.

*

Later, after we've put Alba to bed, I curl around Clare in the dark, and the empty place where the arch of my right foot was itches as I say, "You should call the contractors tomorrow."

I expect her to be relieved. What I don't expect is for her to begin crying, weeping nearly as hard as she did on the day I died, didn't. It's as if she knows, though I've been so careful never to suggest otherwise, that after being halfway gone since September of last year, I have finally decided to grab hold of this chance, and to stay.

 

* * *

 

_Saturday, October 27, 1984/Monday, December 27, 2027 (Henry is 65; Clare is 13, 52, and 57)_

It's a cool, gray morning, sometime in late autumn. I'm wearing a black overcoat and gloves, with my lower legs tucked underneath a thick wool blanket. Today isn't on the List--I exhausted the List more than twenty years ago--but although Clare never saw me at this age when she was young, there's no guarantee that she won't see me today. Neither Clare or I knew what would happen to my feet until it did; I wouldn't want to frighten her, give her nightmares she never had, make her ask questions my younger self won't know the answers to.

The back door of Meadowlark House opens, releases Clare's father and brother, wearing orange and carrying their rifles. At first, I think nothing of it--but then there's a flash of something white moving in the grasses between here and the trees.

Even before the back door opens again, releasing Clare in her nightgown, bare feet running over the frozen ground to stop them...even before she begins shouting at them, something I can't hear, and her father starts shouting back; even before then, I know I've been here before.

Less than a minute after the confusion begins, it ends. The doe bounds away through the grass, more a suggestion of motion than a shape; Clare begins to weep; her father, looking perplexed even at this distance, hands his rifle to her brother, and wraps his arm around her.

As there was no way to make out what they were shouting, there's no way to know what they're saying now. After a few minutes, Clare's father lets her go, and she goes back into the house as they traipse back out into the world, not knowing, not having any idea what would have happened if Clare hadn't come out of the house when she did.

It's been decades since I wished for my feet as strongly as I do now. I want nothing more than to stand up, to run into that house and open the door and ask Clare what she said, and how she could possibly have known. To ask her before she has time to forget; to ask her before I go home to my Clare, who's never remembered anything about this day no matter how much I've described it to her.

I could go, still, on my hands and knees, if it weren't for the arthritis, an affliction I never dreamed of, in all my other days in the Meadow. It's not bad, not yet, but it's already too much to try crawling across the bedroom floor at home, nevermind over this cold, rough terrain. So I sit there and I watch the house, willing Clare to know I'm here, and to come back outside and tell me.

As if I've summoned her through my thoughts, the door opens again; for a moment, I really think she's heard me, somehow. But the woman who comes out, closing the door carefully behind her, is much too old to be Clare, or even Clare's mother. She begins to walk toward the Meadow, toward me; for a moment, I think about running, then remember I can't, the thousandth remembering, the ten thousandth, and stay right where I am.

The woman sees me just as I recognize her.

"Clare!" I shout. "Clare!"

She begins to run toward me, saying nothing, and once she's close enough, I can see why: she's weeping, just as hard as she did on the day I died, as hard as she did on the day I decided I should make an effort, if I was going to live anyway. She's weeping, and she's running, and then she's there, sinking into the grass beside me, reaching for me the way she did when...

The way she never did, because the thing I know in this moment, a diamond-sharp clarity, is that this is not my Clare. She's at least a decade too young, for one thing; my Clare's hair has long since gone white, but this Clare only has a few gray streaks in among the dark. For another thing, my Clare had never looked at me like this--with disbelief and joy and a bereavement that's old, old. The lines on her face are different: less laughter, more grief, the kind I never wanted for her.

"Clare," I say, and what I mean to say next is, 'What did you do?' But there's so much grief on her face, and so much hope, and if there's only time for one thing, then I want to give her joy more than I want the explanation.

I kiss her, or she kisses me, and we clutch at each other in the grass of the Meadow. When the sun comes up half an hour later, there's hay in her hair, and an ache in my knees that will be with me for days. We lie together for a few minutes longer before I ask the question I wanted to before.

"Gene therapy," she says, and tells me what they did, she and Kendrick, in the world she's come from, the one in which I am dead, and have been dead for over two decades.

The telling takes time, but the gist of it is this: Clare is here, where she cannot be; and because Clare is here, I am here, where I should not be, having lived a lifetime I would not have if it weren't for her being here. It's the answer to a question I've been asking myself for twenty years, one final blow to the glass house I've spent my entire life believing: That everything happens only once; that things can only happen the way they happened. That we're here now disproves this, even if every other series of events in my life has pointed the other way.

In the end, maybe it's not surprising that it's Clare's will and not mine that changed everything; of the two of us, she's always been stronger.

When Clare is done with her story, ending with how she woke thirteen-year-old Clare and told her she needed to interrupt her father and brother on their way out to hunt, I hold her close for a few long minutes. It's what she wants from me; maybe it's all she wants from me, other than seeing me and knowing that it worked.

I consider asking Clare what's supposed to happen, when she goes back to her own time...but I think I know. My Clare would have told me, if she'd ever met her future self; she didn't, and so there are only two things that can happen for this Clare. Either she'll return to her own life, or she'll wink out of existence entirely. I've never believed in alternate lives or timelines, never believed that things could happen in any other way--but now I find I can't believe this Clare will simply wink out of time, either. After all, if this Clare never existed, then she could never have come here. If time isn't the fixed entity I've always thought it was, neither is is chaos, allowing for the creation of a paradox. This Clare must exist, so she can be here now, because her being here now is what caused the rest; because this Clare must exist, the world she comes from must still exist, as well, an unwavering constant.

So instead of asking the question, I hold this Clare close, and ask her if she read my letter--the one I wrote for my Clare, the one I found and burned a few months later. My Clare knows nothing about the time I met her in the far future, when she was in her eighties and had been waiting for me for such a long time. It occurs to me now that this is for the best--that perhaps it wasn't my Clare that I visited after all; perhaps it was this one, the one who saved me. Perhaps every time I visited Alba or Clare after my death, I was stepping not only forward in time, but to the side.

"I read it," she says. "But, oh, Henry--I got tired of waiting."

"I'll bet you did," I say, and kiss her again, and keep on kissing her until she is gone a few moments later, leaving only her mother's bathrobe behind, still warm from the heat of her body.

It's not long until it's time for me to go, too, a step forward in time, and perhaps a little to the side.

I fall to the bedroom floor in my present, where my own Clare greets me and helps me up, as she has so often before. This time, I'm the one who begins weeping at the sight of her, and she's the one who holds me, until I'm calm enough to tell her the most incredible story of what she did, in some other life.


End file.
